


Poetry of the Robot Revolution

by Anefi



Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Classism, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Other, Poetry, Pre-Cybertronian Civil War, Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-02-23 13:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: Documents translated from the Decepticon archives and associatedmemory filessecurity footagevignettes.
Relationships: Jazz/Soundwave, Megatron & Soundwave, Skywarp/Starscream/Thundercracker (Transformers)
Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918825
Comments: 25
Kudos: 82





	1. a brick can build a wall or smash a window

Megatron glared up at the rusted ceiling.

“When they ask, 'What is your function?' They are presuming the answer in the way they demand a response.” He lifted his stylus, but set it down again, unsatisfied.

“Convoluted,” Soundwave said. “Second line: Insufficiently succinct.” His quarters at the arena were cramped and a little shabby, with small parts for the cassettes and the battered treasures they hoarded here scattered like caltrops, but the hall was far from the main doors and management offices, which granted some semblance of privacy. Megatron was a frequent enough visitor that the creaking chair in his size had become a permanent fixture.

The Champion’s scowl deepened to a baleful intensity that made lesser mechs lose pressurization in their pneumatics. “Well, what do you suggest instead?” he demanded peevishly.

Soundwave looked up from the circuit board he was fiddling with just enough to give him a bland look through his visor. “Something better.”

Megatron made an aggrieved sound like a train hitting gravel. “ _Supremely_ helpful.”

“That is my function,” Soundwave said, and one of his data cables neatly intercepted the half-chewed stylus Megatron threw at his head.

~

When they ask, “What is your function?”

They are telling you your function.

They are saying, your function is to answer to them

To submit to their judgement

To beg your own utility in their parasitic schemes.

By the labor of my servos, I function

But my labor is not my function.

Are we soulless machines, to have only one purpose?

For our worth to be determined by the limits of a cage?

Let us forge our own functions

In our cogs and our processors

And let no mech call another **[obsolete]**.

_/**File archived: Decepticon Historical Log 00034957438:3456-876:2353:4566.12 **/_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah the sacred bond between writer and beta reader
> 
> two bros chillin backstage at the arena before a deathmatch, five mechanometers apart because that's outside of melee range


	2. The Guiding [not-hand]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In one possible future
> 
> (IDW, empurata mention)

Ask me what I know of Primus

If He lives, I have seen His face

I have seen it a thousand times

He has one optic

And has been denied the use of a vocalizer

That He would use to scream.

~

Rung polished his glasses and squinted out the forward window of the observation lounge of the _Lost Light_ while he finished his recitation. “Yes,” he said mildly, “I always rather liked that one.”

Megatron was hunched over next to him with a hand over his face, but at this, he peeked out from between his fingers. “You did?”

_/**File archived: Lost Light V47843C08712J16.42.4743-OL2**/_


	3. Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before the end of all literary criticism on Cybertron, this work in particular was misconstrued as romantic.

“Yeah,” Jazz said, his perpetual smile threatening to fade at Bumblebee’s innocent question. “Yeah, I had someone, once.” The table went quiet, the friendly game of Protihex Draw slowing as the Autobots around them failed to disguise their interest.

“A conjunx?” Bumblebee’s eyes were wide as he pressed; he wanted a story. A love story.

“I wouldn’t have bet on that,” Smokescreen said, and was promptly elbowed in the side by Bluestreak.

Jazz waved it off. “Nah, we never—I wasn’t thinking like that back then, you know? It felt like we had all the time in the world. Then, one day, it was too late.”

“What happened?” Bumblebee asked, even as Hound was already hissing air through his vents in sympathy.

He was just a kid, Jazz reminded himself, but still; what a question. For a wild second, he wanted to tell them everything, just to see their faces: that when he thought of Cybertron, of _home_ , it wasn’t shining towers or sculpted gardens that he missed; it was hot alleys full of sharp smiles, and those hard candies made from tellurium ore; it was the distant thunder of the Kaon Arena shaking dust from the ceiling of a crowded room. What would they do, what would they say, if they knew that the mech he would’ve shared his life and spark with was one that killed their friends and haunted their nightmares? 

But Jazz didn’t get to be where he was by being reckless with secrets.

Instead, he smiled sadly, wistfully, with just enough pain and fatalistic regret to ensure that nobody brought it up with him again.

“Lost them to the Decepticons, early on in the war,” he said, and spread his hands as though inviting them to fill in the obvious story from there. “We never had a chance.”

_/**File archived: Decepticon Surveillance Log 048984371513:98484-68846:545756:685468.287442**/_

~

The ember does not know

How high it rises

Before it falls

Each flake of ash

Was once a spark

On the exultant leap

To nothing

Or the conflagration.

We commit ourselves to the fire

and teach the stars how to burn.

_/**File archived: Decepticon Historical Document 0003676543:698325-4567:234:3345.567 **/_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes when I am stuck for titles for fics, I think, what if I could find a poem or song lyrics that matched the Mood I was going for precisely? What line would I take from that poem for a title? 
> 
> This is the poem inspired by the process of coming up with a title for [this fic.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23708275)


	4. Choke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for anti-flightframe racism

A gleaming noblemech sipped a pleasant but unremarkable distillate and turned a few degrees toward the slightly shorter, slightly paler mech beside him with a fashionable pearlescent sheen, one of the Senatorial aides scattered decoratively through the crowd. The gala was dreadfully dull, of course; one had to make one’s own entertainment. “I suppose that’s the new Vosian ambassador,” he said, gesturing subtly toward the shining wings on the balcony.

The aide nodded, looking up at him with pretty blue eyes. “They call him the Winglord, I’ve heard. The other fliers do.” 

“Do they, really? How barbaric.” The noblemech’s genteel laugh was decorously hidden behind his glass. “At least he’s prettier than the last one. Almost a shame that he won’t last the megacycle.”

His confidante played up a shudder of revulsion. “Too long, if you ask me. Have you seen that hideous purple one he’s always with? Speaking of barbaric!”

“I can hardly tell them apart,” the noble said airily. “It’s ironic, really. What’s that old adage? Only a seeker could fly anywhere on the planet without ever leaving the gutter.”

  


That night, in their quarters, Starscream very calmly put his hand over Thundercracker’s shaking fist.

Skywarp didn’t look up from bleakly inspecting his own claws. “I should just cap ‘em, right?” he asked. "That’s—I can—just till we get home, or whatever.”

“That’s not good enough,” Starscream said, with the same deadly precision he used to pick apart defenses at the Academy. “That will never be good enough. I was an idiot to ever think otherwise.”

Skywarp’s shoulder’s slumped. The anger radiating from Thundercracker was fierce enough to reach the gamma spectrum. 

Starscream’s hand tightened on his. 

“We’re not going to cap your claws, or your teeth,” he said. “Skywarp, get your sharpener.” His trine mates looked up.

Slowly, Skywarp started to grin. Starscream flashed his own fierce smile in reply. “Next time I bite somebody,” he said, “I want to draw blood.”

  


~

  


When we die, we will die laughing

Our sparks shattered by polished fists

We will die in exaltation

For even when we are dust

We will stick in their joints

We will strangle their vents

The grit of our souls will itch below their flawless paint

And our atoms will find our brothers in the Great Rust Sea. 

Why should we fear the dark? We will find no defeat there.

At the last

We will be truly free.

  


_/**File archived: Decepticon Historical Document 004879853136:37842-2782:7878:126.483**/_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starscream is the epitome of, WATCH me be the motherfucking thing. I love that gremlin.


	5. Justice in the Gutter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Drift adrift

Drift only went to the first meeting because it was raining. 

It wasn’t the first meeting ever held in the Dead End—they were once or twice a decacycle, something like that—but it was the first time he stepped inside. With fat drops of caustic acid drizzling down from the sky and a wide-open door promising a roof that wouldn’t leak—yeah, he went in. There was free energon, which he’d heard there would be, and it’s not like he needed it, he could get his own energon, he wasn’t—he wasn’t desperate, but they were offering, and most people were holding a cube, so. He took one. There were people he recognized from, you know, around, but nobody he knew well. So he sipped his energon—it was better than he expected; not great, but not—it wasn’t bad, and eventually a grizzled old mech with one mismatched leg shorter than the other stood up, and people looked over at him, and he read some stuff from a beat-up datapad with a scuffed purple decal. 

He’d always thought he knew the kind of mechs that meetings like these were for: guys going nowhere, with nothing to lose but no ambition, who wanted to sit around and complain about how life wasn’t fair, how all their problems were other people’s fault, lazy Empties and needle-toothed siphoners and—not him. So it wasn’t really what he’d expected, when the guy started just reading… news. There was a new overlayer being built in Tesarus, and Enforcers were arresting people just minding their own business above ground. No surprise. The assassination attempt on the Winglord wasn’t new news either, but instead of saying “by Vosian separatists,” like all the official channels did, he specified that a spokesperson for some Senator blamed the separatists, and that when asked for comment, the Winglord’s own Third said that was “total scrap.” That got a chuckle.

It wasn’t all stuff about places they would never go, people they would never meet, either; some items were local. Three frames had been lost last week from a relinquishment clinic down the street, racers, boosted and crashed so hard by some rich assholes that they—and the guy said the sparks of the unlucky mechs were _sold_ somewhere—which wasn’t that surprising? They were supposed to give you a new body if something like that happened, but who was going to make them do it? Everybody had heard of somebody who went in to make some shanix and never came out. Drift didn’t know how people running a meeting like this could even find that kind of information, but it was somehow startling to hear it just—reported like that, like a fact, with a murmur of anger in the room like it—mattered. 

They opened it up to anyone else who wanted to say anything, then ended with a date for the next meeting, and another for a booster addiction support group which, whatever. Everyone was welcome to stay until the rain stopped. 

He didn’t go to the next one, or the one after that. But one day, one of the guys he’d worked some off-the-book shifts with was going, so he didn’t say no. Free energon, right? Somebody at that meeting had a holo of a speech—by Megatronus, of all mechs, the gladiator, the Champion. He was—it was pretty compelling. He’s seen some of the fights, of course, mostly illegal rips, but this was—it was something else. He thought about it a lot.

Things got worse, of course. More shortages. Less work. The meetings got bigger. People brought in energon when they could, to share. He wasn't as picky about the taste as he used to be. 

Eventually the Enforcers came, more than he’d ever seen in the whole neighborhood. They roughed people up, and took down names—there went his last chance at ever getting a job outside, probably—and hauled off Bolts. _Bolts_. They said he was a seditionist, and if your frametype was listed as obsolete, they didn’t even have to prove you’d done anything illegal; they fucking _smelted_ him. For running a _meeting_.

He went to the next meeting, or, he showed up when it would have been scheduled. He didn’t know if anyone else would be there. Instead, there were more people crowded into the hall than he had ever seen. The mech who stood up to run the meeting was big and scarred, a fighter, with some anchor sockets on his chassis that marked service in the old Planetary Guard. He surveyed the crowd with hard red optics. “We all know why we’re here,” he said, and an ugly current of mutters lapped and swelled around the room. “The question is,” he said, “What are we going to do about it?” When his red gaze landed on Drift, he returned it without flinching. 

Ratchet was always telling him he should do something with his life. Well. Maybe this was it.

~

The edict is delivered from the shining tower

Addressed to the Children of Primus

I look to my left, and I see a mech shaking on the filthy street, the energon in his lines too thin to let him stand.

I look to my right, and the foreman sneers down at the starving mech from the lofty pedestal of his workers’ broken backs. 

Yet even he will never be raised so high as to cast a shadow on the lowest of those glittering stairs.

I say, it is a poor caretaker who anoints one child with precious oils

And leaves the rest to scavenge in the gutter.

We who are anointed in the blood of our brothers

What do we owe that empty voice from on high?

If he would claim kinship with us, let him step down to our sub-level

And accept the humble rite of our sharpened teeth.

_/**File archived: Decepticon Historical Document 009687677686:789931-1673:749749:1356.18**/_


	6. Emergence

I thought I had seen darkness before I knew the light

But a hundred thousand chords below the faintest gleam had left me no defense

Against a desperate gasp of freeborn air

And the moon

Radiant

Light bestowed unearned, untarnished

On any who could raise dim optics from the ground.

Against the planet’s pulsing veins, I thought myself a beacon

But under the sky

I fell to my knees, blinded

And began to comprehend

A luminous truth on silent arc:

There is light enough for all of us.

I thought I had seen darkness, before I knew the light.

~

“The imagery of the emergent protoform is a powerful metaphor for the scholar’s incipient search for knowledge. In this work, the Voice of Tarn asserts that the life-affirming truth of the Academy, represented by the moon, shines on any who are capable of turning their attentions to the pursuit—” The oblivious professor droned on, his audience about evenly split between diligently taking notes and doodling on their data pads.

Far above the elaborately engraved floor of the lecture hall, Buzzsaw was tucked behind the sweeping crown of some plated statue sticking out of the wall, part of a whole scene of raised idols that left a lot of convenient shadows. He shifted his weight, settled his wings, and opened a silent comm line to Frenzy. “Please tell me we’re almost done here,” he said, eyeing the crowd of delicate data-castes. He wasn’t going to miss this place.

Frenzy replied in a klik. “Download’s almost finished and the charges are set. Let’s get the frag out of here.”

Fifteen breems later, they’d met up with Ravage and hitched a ride on Astrotrain and were speeding back toward Kaon, sirens fading behind them. Ravage had been running around Iacon for a decacycle before they even got there, so he sacked out immediately, paws curled and tail twitching, a puddle of black plating in a half-empty crate.

“Hey, Frenzy,” Buzzsaw said. “You remember your first day out of the mines?” He and Ravage still carried spark memories of the first red light after their own forgings, but—that was different.

Frenzy glared at him, but didn’t take a swing, at least, though it may have been justified, if he was that sensitive about it. Legs gone still where they overhung the edge of the bench meant for full-sized mechs and hands gripping tight, he was silent for a while, long enough for Buzzsaw to assume he wasn’t going to answer. “Yeah, I remember,” he finally said, barely audible over the rumbling clatter of Astrotrain at speed.

Buzzsaw didn’t look up from straightening the microplates on his wings. “What was it like? Seeing the surface for the first time?”

Frenzy looked away, out the window, at the dead flats spinning by and the sharply twisting mountains in the distance. Thunderheads of acrid smoke swelled on the horizon. “One time, I saw a guy ripped open by a loose borer. His whole chest, down to the spark chamber, while he was still screaming. It reminded me of that.”

Buzzsaw squinted, recalibrating his optics, as if that could help him see the connection. “How so?” he asked.

Frenzy said, “It was so slagging bright.”

_/**File archived: Decepticon Mission Log 000000018417:1865-349:2196974:654.1654**/_

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12867291), of course.
> 
> Thank you for reading! I'm also [on tumblr](https://anefi.tumblr.com/), if you want to say hello :)


End file.
